Hugh Trenchard

Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky was born on a mutinous December night upon snowswept hard packed Siberian tundra in 1872. As an infant, from his Russian father and Mongolian mother he was thrust into the backpack of a Welsh traveller who saw Vygotsky’s blue almond eyes and golden skin, and who, over the course of two days as guest at the Vygotsky mud hut, was gradually transformed from an honest but childless traveller, into a desperate thief with a longing that shredded all her Christian teachings, a longing that shucked all meaning from every synapse of her conscience from the moment she saw Vygotsky’s perfect skin and eyes that lit like sky the longest of December nights. In her fury of desperation, the Welsh traveller raced for two days and nights on a horse without rest or food to St. Petersberg, abandoned the exhausted and dying horse and took a train from there, and tumbled through unforgiving nights begging for food, and finally made her way back to Zurich, where she gave Vygotsky his middle name.

Years passed and Vygotsky received the ovation of a crowd, and he said to them, quieting their adulation: “I returned in the middle of the night to complete my story. In the hours that preceded, I was bereft of imagination and inspiration. But then it came to me:

My true mother and father were not known to me, but my Welsh mother and Swiss father raised me on a diet of mathematics and linguistics, and I became a professor of physics at the age of twenty six, established the scale relationship between the expansion of the universe and the propagation of economies and human languages, and hence the constant that underlies all the cognitive processes of the human brain, and finally proved the existence of the universal property of analogous consciousness.

But then when 37 years old I was rejected by my lover, my universe was a vacuum of meaning, and every discovery I had made shriveled to the sharpest point upon which I wished to thrust my heart. Then I was forced to return to the beginning again, and I shouted out in vain to the multitudinous night: “Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky was born on a mutinous December night!”

And at first I could not complete the story, for the point upon which I sought to impale myself transformed into a vast fog of feelings, and I cried out to the infinite cosmos: “Would all that I feel could be compressed into a ball for you to crush and shatter, and scatter all over you. And if you would, then there are no analogous mathematical properties of the universe that would dare to fill the synapses of my mind to crowd you again. Come back Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky, come back and abandon the infinite stars so that they will no longer leave you empty again. Come back my lover, come back my Welsh mother and Swiss father, come back to tell me and my lover of the story again of how you took me from my Mongolian mother and Russian father, and how I ended up here; for at last I know who I am, and I am no one without you.”

Then as the audience cycled their tremulous ovation again, finally Vygotsky completed the story with these words, his voice loud with conviction: “Batukhan Trystan Vygotsky was born on a mutinous December night…”

Recently I’ve learned of a Facebook campaign that is underway to send a message to the B.C. Liberal government that funding for sports is important. Some of my discussion here is from comments I posted to the Facebook page for Thumbs-Up-For-Funding-Sports.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thumbs-Up-For-Funding-Sport/245709219290

www.thumbsupforfunding.ca

While I agree that the goal itself of increased funding (or at least no reduction in current levels of funding) is a laudable one, I also find myself wondering if the approach to seeking funding should be refined somewhat.

Firstly, we need to identify why funding for sport in Canada is not a priority for politicians and policy makers, and is only marginally supported by the public. My own sense is that funding for sports is not a priority in Canada because sport suffers from an image problem. It seems the Canadian public, politicians, and the makers of public policy by and large perceive athletes to be self-interested competitors whose egos and vanity are nurtured in the pursuit of domination and superiority in their drive to be number one. Ours is an egalitarian society, so the argument goes, and we seek to foster participation among those who simply wish to participate, but we should only marginally support competitive activities because competition develops a cut-throat win-at-all costs, dominate thy-neighbour and oppress-thy-lover mentality. Following the argument further, professional athletes are overpaid in any event, and tax dollars are not well spent on funding sport when it should be the purview of private and corporate sponsorship.

If there is any truth at all to this public image, then, as supporters of funding sport, I believe we must not only overcome the “image problem”, but we must also convince the public and the policy makers that it is actually in the best interests of Canadian society as a whole to fund sport. My discussion here focuses not so much on how to overcome the image problem, but on what we must do to convince the public on the how it lies in the best interests of society to fund sports.

To me a useful way of approaching this issue is to ask what are the costs to society if we do NOT fund sport? Sport provides youths and adults alike a focus on physically healthy activities that keeps them out of prisons and hospitals and fosters a degree of self-discipline that enables them to be highly productive contributors to society. The financial and social costs to taxpayers of a physically unfit population – which includes those whose lack of focus and self-discipline allows them to swayed toward drugs or other criminal activities – are enormous. This obviously applies only to a small segment of the population (i.e. that segment of the population with a propensity toward crime), but the argument goes that by supporting sport we also support the opportunity for kids to find a constructive focus and outlet for aggression and competition, rather than a destructive one.

Similarly, athletes exhibit a sense of positive self-awareness and control that is encouraging and inspirational to others. I believe the athlete’s positive lifestyle and attitudes propagate through all the spheres of influence in which athletes find themselves. So, an investment in sport is, in a very real sense, an investment in the future of Canada. Indeed, I do not think it’s an unreasonable stretch to say that an investment in sport is an investment in the future of humanity.

What we need to do, then, as sports-funding advocates, is to gather
statistics that show the overall benefits to society as a whole in terms of savings to the health care system, the education and justice systems; to show the increased productivity in measurable contributions to society as well as less measurable ones like how athletes also foster positive attitudes among their children, who also carry forth into future generations the capacity for healthy self-discipline and productivity.

Questionairres given to sport participants are a good way of establishing these statistics. The results need to be presented to the public, politicians and policy makers so that it is clear to everyone that the benefits to supporting sport are enormous.

A questionaire could include such questions as:

How long have you been involved in your sport? What sacrifices did you make? Were you ever involved in criminal activities, such as illegal drugs (including performance enhancing ones) and if so, how often? How often did you access health care? Do you think your example of discipline has been inspirational to others? What do you do now for a career, or what do you plan to do? How successful are your children in school and if they are grown, what do they do?

That is a start, but the idea is to establish what the costs and benefits of the athletes’ lifestyle is to society. My hypothesis is that overall athletes’ savings and contributions to society are enormous, and that funding sport is not at all about supporting egos and a win-at-all costs mentality.

So the question is really, how can we afford NOT to fund and provide resources for athletes?

In 1816, George Brabantjieff’s fragile genes allowed him only to be carted in a wheelbarrow, at the age of eleven, through London streets by Alexander Poole, a vegetable gardener who lived by the Thames among a grove of Mulberry Trees, which he brought from Armenia and cultivated with care.

No one troubled Poole where he made his home and grew carrots and potatoes and beans, ate them for himself and fed to Brabantjieff, and sold them in the markets. But Poole frequently resented Brabantjieff, who was left to his caretaking by a young Armenian woman when Poole travelled to Turkey and then to the Mountains of Ararat with Cortezza, Portuguese dancer, whose scar beneath her lip was the mark of an earlier lover’s overzealous passion, from whom she escaped one night in Lisbon with nothing but a shred of her life. It was during that visit in 1804 when Poole acquired his Mulberry seeds and finally returned to England, in the spring of 1805, with Brabantjieff.

On a winter afternoon when Poole longed for the orange dusk of Armenian nights; when, for the sixth day, the London sunset was obscured by obstinate rain and clouds; when the cold and his fever stretched thin the meninges of his brain and spinal chord, the wheelbarrow in which Brabantjieff sat, and the carrots beside him, struck an obstacle and propelled Brabantjieff onto the stony path. In the ubiquitous darkness, Brabantjieff’s head struck a stone, and he could not be saved. But before his quivering body ceased all motion, Brabantjieff said this to Poole, his voice clear and emanating from the darkness, for his mouth could not be seen: “Thank you, my dear Mr. Poole. That I have been half of you, half of all people, save for the little boy we saw yesterday with no arms; I have been one portion of all people. Like you are too, Mr. Poole, one part of all mankind. I can leave you now, for without my legs you cared for me like I was part of you. Thank you Mr. Poole, go now and take your part in mankind, and remember me, that I was part of you, and all of you.”

Poole was never certain whether the wheelbarrow pitched against that stone in the darkness entirely by accident, but when he eventually returned to Lisbon and found Cortezza, travelled again to Armenia to stand at the foot of the Mountains of Ararat, only then did he at last understand Brabantjieff. By happenstance he passed a grove of Mulberry Trees, and he was with Cortezza beneath the orange light of dusk; then he forgave himself and all mankind.

Assuming there is an odd handful of people who do come to take a peek at these ramblings, it is probably a reasonable assumption that most come to read about my latest running or cycling endeavors, which, for what they are worth, are of some interest to the running and cycling community. I don’t doubt there is truth to this, but to what degree, I am largely unaware.

In recent months, however, I surely disappoint those readers, few in number though they may be, since the reflections here are much less about describing such exercises of the body, than they are about engaging in the exercise of the literary, or academic, or purely speculative mind and, where-ever possible, exalting one of my favorite themes: self-referential paradox.

Having said that, I am willing to reach into the shifting sands of all the errant words heaped here that distract from the efforts of my body, and extract a kernel of reference to my latest bodily endeavor, that being the Pioneer 8km running race, before, during, and after which my legs felt like bricks, or lead, or cement and the effort like running in sand, or water, or snow, and the desire to cease the effort after 5km, intense, and the feeling of great fortune for having stayed the course to collect the top Master* award and one hundred dollars, bitter-sweet. Bitter, because the time was nigh 40 seconds slower than last year when I was sixth Master in a much deeper Masters field, and sweet because the reward was unexpected and, in a sense, at least some objective validation of the hard work, regardless of my own perception of the result. Bitter sweet too, because there are others, younger and much faster, who linger on the precipice of becoming Masters runners and who instantly will shift me down the ranks of that category.

But why the effort should not simply be satisfying in its own right and nothing less, I am amazed now even as I write these words that I still must ask myself this question after twenty two years of relatively serious athletic competition. But at least there is always the ever pervasive sense of hope, the sense that the body, if properly rested, or sharp, or peaked, has much more to offer me. But there is also acceptance and elation, muted though these emotions may be, for it is certain that I could not keep doing this if after every effort there was not, buried somewhere, a kernel of these too.

Having said all that, we, like the ouroboros, come around again: we may write about the exercises we engage in, or we may, by writing, engage in exercise and speak of our exercises, ones of the body and ones of the mind, analyze them, speculate upon their origins and their trajectories, and then stop here… because the last word written reflects the cycle within the cycle; it is the last one read by an odd handful of people who come to take a peek at these ramblings: this one, here.

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*Craig Odermatt won the 40-44 year age category, but is 39 at this time. He turns 40 this year, and so for the purpose of the race series, he is in the 40-44 category. To qualify for the top Master award, one had to be at least 40 on the day of the race.

Experimental writing, in the tradition of Borges.

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Anthony Cardoza, whose name, in combination with his activities, was perceived by some from an ancient secret order to be connected with certain elaborate configurations of a school of Herring fish, is not dead, contrary to the rumours, though he has been absent from the streets for three years.

I, who knew Cardoza well, am now a messenger, but was once Cardoza’s closest confidante and associate. I distanced myself from him in 1467 after fourteen years of integration when I was 28 and he 42. I have not seen Cardoza during his three-year absence, an absence that is like a wound through the hearts of thousands, and I have not heard from anyone that he is in fact alive.

But I have had time now to recount the fourteen year history of our integration, the days and the locations at which we met, the anecdotes and circumscriptions of those who were near at those times, the book he left me with; in particular I considered the words of the letter found by Alphonse of the secret order who indicated the motion of a school of Herring fish and how it altered the course of an ocean current and the location of the bottle of rum that contained his letter, the bottle Cardoza cast into the water in 1464; Alphonse said these events explained why he found the letter that Cardoza wrote, which explanation I dismissed.

There were some who claimed that, while unconditionally generous and compassionate, Cardoza was plagued by the secrets of a confrontation in 1450 with a tribe of Imazighen Berbers who claimed allegiance to the infamous Tariq ibn Ziyad, which secrets, it was said, left Cardoza’s eyes and frequent smile bereft of sincerity, though I knew Cardoza loved his followers with a passion that pierced every dark night that Cardoza had seen but never shared.

But I who once knew Cardoza, no longer know him, though I am certain that I am he. Yet there is no one since who has recognized me and told me so. For this I do not blame them, for I am glad finally to have found anonymity. Still I am uncertain why this has come to pass. And although I have excluded the ruminations of the secret order from my analysis of events past (for the problem of Cardoza’s absence cannot include the ocean currents or the Herring fish because I am here in the flesh and to state that this or that configuration of fish never happened is entirely invalid), that I am Cardoza validates indeed the circumscriptions of those who have provided me clues in addition to my own recollections; that I am Cardoza is proof that things do not change unless specified otherwise: the silence of the townspeople indicates no evidence to the contrary. And I, who am now a messenger, have evidence and no doubt, and now relay the words of the letter that Alphonse found: Cardoza lives!